In his book Cultures of Thinking in Action, Dr. Ron Ritchhart sets out eight mindsets that educators must embrace when creating a culture of thinking in their school. The third mindset he speaks to in the book is: To Create a New Story of Learning, We Must Change the Role of the Student and the Teacher.
What is the story we tell our students when they step into our classroom? Dr. Ritchart writes, “A culture lives in the messages it sends.” Our own story of learning is made up of many different messages. It is impacted by constraints both inside and outside the learning environment. To change the story of learning in our classrooms and in our schools – we must understand what messages we’re sending now and re-define the roles of student and teacher in the story we tell moving forward.
Redefining the Role of Student and Teacher
Dr. Ritchhart writes, "Schools remain the way they are, partly because students, teachers, and parents have become socialized in the established ways of doing things and have come to see established practices as necessary features of real school." As we create a new story of learning in our schools, we must understand what goes into our current thinking around the roles of teachers and students, and whether it serves students well.
What messages are we telling students about what makes a “good student” in our class? Traditional educational models saw teachers as the deliverer of information, the time manager, the disciplinarian, the evaluator, the speaker, and the rescuer. Students were passive vehicles to receive information, to listen, and to avoid mistakes. Today we know that those definitions are constraining for both student and teacher. When students are reduced to passive listeners in the classroom, their engagement levels go down. With the NGSS, students are now required to be active participants and thought leaders in the classroom.
As the roles of student and teacher continue to evolve, students come to us with preconceived ideas of what it means to be a good student. To develop the critical thinking skills they need to become the engineers, mathematicians, and scientists of the future, we must consider what messages we send about what makes a good learner in our classroom and align our own definition with the NGSS.
Conforming to Commonplace Ideas about How Schools Look and Feel
A school’s story of learning isn’t just written in the classroom, or by its teachers and students. The story is set within the practices and architecture that surrounds it, and some of these practices and school models have been around for decades. From the 6 or 7 period-based school day to the design of our school buildings, and how we group students by age to when our school day starts and ends, our classroom practices and learning stories are constrained by where we work.
Think about some of the most commonplace ideas about how schools look and feel, and where they come from. How are those ideas impacted by how schools are portrayed in films and tv, in news stories, and by our own educational experiences? What are the types of images we see over and over again: smiling kids, neat and tidy classrooms, kids in seats with hands raised. But those stock images don’t define the real experience of learning today. Some of those common views actually serve as a barrier to the productive struggle we should be actively encouraging within a NGSS-led curriculum today.
If we think about productive struggle, it looks much more like action, collaboration, confusion, mess, frustration, uncertainty, and success. That’s what authentic learning really looks like, not the glossy photos printed on the front of a school brochure or highlighted on websites and social media accounts. We need to work together to better communicate to parents, administrators, and members of the larger school community what productive struggle and authentic learning looks and feels like. As we redefine the role of student and teacher, we must share that story externally as well.
Promoting Engaged and Empowered Learners
What type of learners are we promoting in our schools and in our classrooms? According to Dr. Ritchhart’s book, historically we fostered conforming students who followed rules, completed tasks, and repeated back information they were given by their teachers. Success was defined by grades based on summary evaluation. This definition of a “good student” was promoted in messages not just from our teachers and report cards, but also by administrators, board members, and our community.
Today, the NGSS promotes students who are engaged and empowered. This is a cultural shift from promoting passive learners to challenging students to be inquisitive, creative, and innovative. When our goal becomes promoting the innovative thinking that STEM career fields look for, you can see how promoting passive learners by giving students a clearly defined task and grading them on whether they accomplished it step by step doesn’t engage the same level of critical thinking and engagement with the subject matter.
Instead, when we encourage engaged learners, we promote learning with a purpose by linking content to real-world context. In the classroom, this looks like focusing on the thinking as the end goal, as students build critical thinking skills that can be used outside the classroom. To do this, we must also re-define what we see as success. Instead of repeating a definition back, engaged students are showing a depth of understanding about what it means.
When promoting empowered students is our guiding principle, teachers challenge our students to set their own goals and learning objectives. Teachers encourage students to build a personal connection with the subject and help them find their own passions and build their own agency in the classroom. For these learners, success is defined through personal growth, supporting students of all levels to engage directly with their own ideas and build on their own knowledge and experiences.
The entrenched practice of teacher-led instruction is a barrier to promoting engaged and empowered students. A lot of these practices are based on getting students to listen and to behave in class, rather than engaging and empowering them. When students are struggling in these classrooms, the teacher jumps in quickly to help so that the entire class can move on quickly. But science is hard. Thinking is hard – and through individual and collective struggle, students can accomplish big things. Promoting empowered and engaged students allows them to co-create and build relevant knowledge. That’s where the innovation, the creative thinking, and the high levels of engagement come from. But first we must get over the idea that our students can’t accomplish hard things in our classrooms.
Releasing Responsibility to Increase Student Engagement
Another challenge we must overcome when building a new story of learning is the worry of losing control. In his book, Dr. Ritchhart writes, “The teacher does not have to lose power in order for students to gain it.” This highlights the importance of building a culture of learning together in your classroom. It’s a two-way street where roles and expectations are clearly defined by the entire learning community and evolve as we improve together. To support student agency, we must also provide the tools and routines they need to work effectively when given the opportunity to lead.
As teachers release more responsibility to our students and promote curiosity and creative thinking, one thing we can do to help is model the behaviors we want to see. When a student comes to us believing that a “good student” is someone who is quiet and doesn’t question the status quo, we have to model what we’re looking for, including listening carefully to our students and asking them thoughtful questions in return. We have to show them our own innate curiosity about the study of science.
As we redefine the role of student and teacher in our classroom, we’ll have some uncomfortable moments. But we can work together to strengthen our learning community and set achievable goals and expectations. We can help students make personal connections to the subject matter by allowing them the time and space to ask the questions they care about and work together to answer them. This is where things get really exciting – when students are learning through doing, when they are sharing their own ideas and perspectives, and when they are genuinely curious about what’s going on in the classroom.
Building a Learning Community Together
Another way teachers can shift how their authority is used in the classroom is from enforcer to community supporter. When we challenge students to take on a more active role in building a learning community, we can shift some of the responsibilities for enforcing the rules of that community over to them. When we set the rules of that community together, students are more invested in the outcome.
To accomplish this, we must show our students that their ideas matter. When they have ownership over their community, they become more engaged members of it. With this comes the responsibility to nurture the community. For example, an important part of being a member of a community is learning how to respond well to feedback and that different viewpoints are valuable. At the beginning, we may need to reinforce our community rules by reminding students what it looks like to be active listeners and non-judgmental participants. It’s exciting to see students improve these skills and begin “policing” one another.
Dr. Ritchhart writes about classrooms without student authority, “such environments don't provide students with the opportunities that they need to develop as independent self-regulating learners, capable of decision-making, critical thinking or creativity.” When we give students agency and decision making power, it gives them the opportunity to create something meaningful to them, be a part of a positive learning community, and take ownership over their own actions.
Promoting Deeper Learning with Supports and Structures
“When the learning environment promotes classroom talk, students are consistently explaining and justifying their thinking, encouraging deep learning that mere didactic instructions cannot achieve,” writes Dr. Ritchhart. Leading their own discussions in pairs and groups is one way to engage students to interact more personally with the subject matter and refine their own ideas about it.
There are many supports, structures, and tools that can help students take agency over their own thinking and learning in the classroom. In addition, we must give them the time and space to think deeper. For example, in a Turn and Talk activity, where we ask students to turn to a partner and respond to a prompt, instead of asking them to “review what we did yesterday,” we can challenge them to think deeper with a prompt like, “I want you to talk about one way that you saw states of matter happening since our last class. Where did you see a phase change in the state of matter?"
This is a great prompt because it gets students connecting what they learn in class to their own experiences. To extend the learning, we can bring students back together and ask them to share out. First, this sets the expectation in the beginning that students better be engaged in the partner activity because they’re going to have to explain their thinking to the class. Second, it allows students to learn from one another and to refine their thinking based on different points of view. We’re giving these students the opportunity to explain and justify their thinking, to build on one another’s ideas, and to develop a better understanding of the concept as a group. By starting the activity in pairs, we provided the support the students needed to prepare to actively engage in a larger discussion.
To develop the behaviors we want to see, teachers must model them, promote them, and reward them. When supported by classroom routines and structures, students can develop the active listening, critical thinking, and communication skills they need to have agency over their own learning. When teachers are confronting conformity and altering the perception of the roles of student and teacher, we need to make our thinking visible to our students. For example, prompting them with: “Ideas are going to come into your mind, and I want you to share them. Questions are going to come into your mind, and I want you to share them. And you know what? They might be connected, or they might not be connected, and that's okay. We’re going to work through this together.”
Moving from Talking to Listening in the Classroom
One important step in changing the role of teachers and students in the classroom is by shifting the amount of time teachers talk versus students talk. When we have the supports and expectations in place to allow our students to take the lead, it’s time to sit back and listen.
A startling statistic from Dr. Ritchhart’s book is, “On average teacher talk constitutes 70 to 80% of all talk done in classrooms.” Not only does this gap impact how much time students have to engage with their own ideas, it impacts how teachers monitor learning and intervene. Listening is how teachers understand where their students are on their road to mastery. When we do it consistently, teachers can intervene in time to help students refine their thinking. In addition, teachers need to celebrate listening as much as we celebrate talking to teach our students that listening doesn’t mean you’re not thinking hard.
One way to engage students to share more of the things you want to listen to is to ask them questions you don’t know the answer to. For example, “Tell me more about that. What makes you think of rolling downhill when you think of gravity?” As a teacher, I may have taught this topic dozens of times to hundreds of students, but I genuinely don't know what makes them think of rolling downhill when they think of gravity. I'm genuinely curious about that and interested in understanding more about the connections they are making. I’m learning from my students, which is knowledge that I can use to improve my own teaching on this subject.
When we ask students to further articulate their thoughts, we’re requiring them to make their thinking visible to themselves, to their peers, and to their teacher. When they do, we’re all learning together. As the student refines their own thinking, they spark new ideas and connections for the rest of the class. That’s the foundation of inquiry and exploration. Celebrating these hard conversations, where we struggle with ideas and revise our thinking together, is important. That’s how we build a learning community where everyone feels valued and successful.
Promoting Student Agency and Resilience
Dr. Ritchhart writes, “For students to develop a sense of initiative, self-efficacy, and resilience they must be given the roles that require those skills. At the same time, we must be careful of assuming the role of rescuer in which we rob students of the opportunity to develop these attributes.” One of the roles we need to re-evaluate as teachers is the role of savior. Too often we come to the rescue of our students, which isn’t preparing them for success outside of our classroom.
Ask yourself, how are you creating opportunities that require initiative, self-efficacy, and resilience? Are you designing lessons where the “figuring out” is key? This is what propels true student-centered learning. It’s hard to see our students struggle because we chose this profession to help students. One of the biggest changes teachers need to make in their thinking is that struggle in the classroom is good. It’s essential to building the innovative thinkers we need as our next generation of scientists and engineers. Over-helping and over-supporting is detrimental to building a culture of thinking. While it’s not natural for some people to sit back and let their students struggle, it’s essential.
Instead, we need to normalize struggle by celebrating the idea that learning and thinking is a rewarding challenge. For example, we can shift the narrative for a student feeling bad that their experiment or model didn’t turn out the way they wanted it to, by celebrating their hard work and helping them identify what they can learn from their results. We can reward improvement from where students started to where they ended up.
To redefine what a “good learner” is in our classroom, we need to communicate the message that curiosity is a strength, not disruptive, annoying, or off task. We can promote engaged and empowered students who come to class prepared to think deeper, grapple with complex real-world ideas, and consider different points of view. Sometimes that means breaking with the conformity of ingrained practices and the common ideas of school, grading, and the role of student and teacher. It also requires facing our own fears of what that looks like in our classroom.
